Roger Zelazny
1975
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
The Sign of the Unicorn is the third book in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series. It doesn’t actually further the plot of the Chronicles much, except (a) to reveal that there is definitely a conspiracy within the family to kill our hero Corwin, and (b) to give us a little more information about the maze-like Pattern which seems to be the source of power for the royal family of Amber.
And while it does include Zelazny’s trademark unique and dazzling surrealistic imagery, it is the most disjointed of the books in this series so far, with the story line jumping from character to character and from land to land somewhat at random. A little too randomly even for this Zelazny fan, anyway. I need a bit more of a string to follow.
At the end of the previous book, The Guns of Avalon, Corwin’s brother Eric died waging a valiant battle to save Amber from an attack by the evil forces of the Courts of Chaos. As he died, he gave the magical Jewel of Judgment that he was wearing to Corwin, essentially deeming him the next King of Amber.
Unicorn picks up soon after Guns left off, with Corwin having had possession of the throne of Amber for just about a week. His reign hasn’t started out well. It turns out that during the events that took place back in book one, his brother Caine was murdered by spur-handed, heavy-jawed beast-men in the shadowlands outside of Amber, and someone has arranged the evidence to make it look like Corwin did it.
Corwin then remembers that his other brother Random was being chased by these same spur-handed beast-men when he arrived begging for help at their sister Flora’s door. So, to try to follow this lead to find Caine’s murderer, and thereby exonerate himself, Corwin makes Random tell him the complete story of how he came to be chased by the beast-men in the first place, which was:
Yet another brother, Brand, was trapped in a surreal land of stormy, shifting rocks, where dying creatures floated up into the sky. While trying to rescue Brand, Random fought a really cool clear-bodied snake beast and was eventually able to kill it, but then was pursued by its spur-handed beast-men masters.
The beast men pursued Random all the way through one of Zelazny’s trademark psychedelic scenery-shifting hellrides to a bus stop restroom in California. Along the way, he lost all his trumps, so he wasn’t able to use them to jump to another location or even to call for assistance. He finally made his way to Flora’s house in Westchester, where he was able to escape, thanks to Flora’s and Corwin’s help.
Corwin adds what Random has told him to the other things he knows about: the disappearance of their father, the king; the appearance of the black road; all the beast men and strange creatures traveling along it to attack Amber; and the revelation that Dara is some kind of evil queen from the Courts of Chaos. It all points to there being some kind of conspiracy by the Courts of Chaos to take the throne of Amber and/or destroy it.
To try to get a better handle on it all, Corwin decides to walk the Pattern again, this time to awaken the Jewel of Judgment, which supposedly has unbelievable untapped powers that nobody knows how to unlock. He does this and then decides to go see Flora, intending to browbeat her into revealing who asked her to be his overseer on Earth.
His now (suspiciously) faithful brother Gérard goes with him. On their journey, Corwin and Gérard get lost on the slopes of Mount Kolvin and see a unicorn, which Zelazny is somehow able to make seem awesome without being hokey. The unicorn leads them through distorted cubist scenery to the Grove of the Unicorns, which contains an alternate version of the Pattern. Gérard hypothesizes that this may be the real Pattern, and the one in Amber only a shadow.
After this discovery, Corwin goes back to Amber and starts to gather up his remaining brothers and sisters to try to hash out exactly what is going on. Together, they use the trumps to find Brand, who is locked in some kind of prison, but while they are rescuing Brand, one of them stabs Corwin. The scene is so scattered and disjointed that no one manages to see a thing, including Corwin himself.
At this point Brand wakes up and tells us and Corwin a bunch of important backstory, including that two separate cabals (Eric/Julian/Caine and Brand/Fiona/Bleys) both had plans to depose their father and take the throne. Both of the cabals have been thwarted, whether by each other or the attack of the Courts of Chaos.
Corwin is then attacked yet again while in Amber, but the Jewel of Judgment lets him escape to his house in upstate New York. After all this craziness, Corwin understandably decides to go to the ghostlike, floating, moonlit land of Tir Na Nog to heal his wounds.
Again, this book feels disorganized. It reads more like a free-associational, surreal piece of art, rather than a part of a larger linear plot. I’ll grant that this kind of writing can be fun to read, and certainly many of the individual scenes and conversations in Unicorn are creative and colorful and often funny. Especially when Zelazny juxtaposes modern technology like intravenous feeding with the fantasy sword-and-sorcery world of Amber. But, as a whole, the book isn’t all that rewarding if you are looking instead for more furthering of Corwin’s story line, or more answers about the forces arrayed against him.
I will say, however, that Unicorn is an extremely helpful book for those who weren’t paying complete attention to the twists and turns of the first two books, because it is filled with a huge amount of rehashing and backfilling of what has already happened up to now. It also includes a very detailed explanation of the line of succession to the throne of Amber, which Corwin relates to help Ganelon, but which is helpful for us, too.
Roger Zelazny
1972
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
The Guns of Avalon is the second of ten books in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber fantasy series. This book feels less organized and is less satisfying than the first one; the plot is more herky-jerky. But Zelazny continues to keep his writing trippy and intense with hypnotically surreal imagery. And his main character’s dry, incongruously modern attitude keeps it from getting too drearily romantic.
The Guns of Avalon picks up right where the first book, Nine Princes in Amber, left off, which is when our plucky hero, prince Corwin, has just escaped from a deep, dark, disgusting dungeon. He had been thrown into the dungeon by his brother, Eric, in retaliation for challenging Eric’s claim to the crown of Amber. Eric had also burnt out Corwin’s eyes, which was painful and inconvenient, to say the least.
Fortunately, Corwin’s powers of regeneration allowed him to regrow his eyes while he was in prison. And, while incarcerated, he also happened to run into Dworkin—the artist who had created the magical tarot cards that enable the princes and princesses of Amber to communicate with and teleport to each other—and convinced him to use his magical drawing powers to transport Corwin out of prison to a shadowland called Cabra.
Cabra is peaceful and far, far away from Amber, and is therefore the perfect place to recuperate after you’ve spent four years in a dungeon regrowing your eyes. After a time, though, Corwin feels like he is rested enough, and it is time for him to resume his pursuit of the throne. He heads towards Avalon, one of the many shadowlands he has lived in before (and one of many of the Chronicles’ overt nods to Arthurian legend), where he hopes to raise an army. On the way, he runs into Sir Lancelot du Lac, severely wounded from an attack. He carries Lancelot to the closest fort, the Keep of Ganelon, for medical care.
At the Keep, he rekindles his friendship with Ganelon, whom he was kind of a jerk to many years before, but who doesn’t harbor a grudge (and who will turn out to become a steadfast friend and companion). Ganelon tells Corwin about a mysterious Circle of blackness that started somewhere in the hinterlands but is expanding steadily towards Avalon and Amber, and which spews death and horrifying monsters. Corwin, Ganelon, and Lancelot stage a brief effort to attack the Circle; they aren’t able to drive it back, but they do find out that the Circle and the evil beasts within it come from the Courts of Chaos, a sort of rival evil counterpart to Amber.
Corwin and Ganelon then continue on to Avalon, whereupon Corwin runs into another one of his brothers, Benedict, who is raising an army to fight the Circle. Corwin also meets a woman named Dara who claims to be Benedict’s great-granddaughter, and he develops kind of a crush on her. Thinking she is family, he teaches her about the trumps, and about shadow worlds and how to model them. He also tells her about the “pattern”—a maze-like construction in the palace that only descendants of the royal family of Amber can walk, and which grants them certain powers when they do. (This will prove to be a big mistake.)
Anyway, continuing Corwin’s anti-Eric vendetta: gunpowder will not burn in Amber, making normal firearms useless there. But Corwin has secretly discovered that jeweler’s rouge, which is neutral everywhere else, behaves like gunpowder in Amber. So he and Ganelon set off on a series of journeys to a past version of southwest Africa to get a whole lot of diamonds, then to World-War-I-era Antwerp to sell the diamonds and buy the rouge, and then to Switzerland to buy weapons with which to fire the rouge. He also raises a new army of hairy, fanged, clawed men from reliable shadowlands to wield those weapons.
The whole venture is head-spinning and feels a little too haphazard as they jump randomly from place to place and time to time. But, fortunately, each journey is a trademark surrealistic Zelazny hellride across shadowlands with features like lemon-yellow skies and striped, feathered houses and red-and-black striped horses.
They come back to Avalon only to discover that Benedict is pissed off at Corwin for raising an Army against Eric. Benedict pursues them as they ride at breakneck speed to Amber, the whole time running parallel to a black road, an arm of the evil Circle, that now stretches all the way to Amber. Benedict catches up with them close to Amber, and Corwin defeats him in a truly excellent swordfight on the black road.
At this point Corwin gets a tarot card message from Eric to please delay his attack, because the forces from the evil Circle have finally reached Amber and all hands are needed to defend it. As if, thinks Corwin! He rides to Amber with his forces and discovers Amber being beset by manticores and wyverns and razor-billed birds. His brothers Eric, Julian, and Caine are all fighting—and losing. Corwin feels a twinge of remorse at the carnage, and decides to use his forces to defend Amber after all, using up all his jeweler’s rouge fighting off the evil monsters.
Anti-climactically, Eric ends up getting mortally wounded in the battle. Before he dies, he gives Corwin their father’s Jewel of Judgement, symbolically granting the throne to Corwin. (The Jewel allows the wearer to control the weather, and possibly has other powers that have not yet been revealed.)
After all of this, Dara reappears; she has been tailing Corwin. And it turns out she is not Benedict’s great-granddaughter after all! She is an evil wraith from the cursed Circle and she was only following him to find the way to Amber! She races into the palace and walks the pattern, whereupon she turns into a terrifyingly evil hellbeast, threatens to destroy Amber, and then disappears.
All in all, The Guns of Avalon feels less like a novel unto itself, and more of a bridge from one book to another. Its plot is less coherent and more like a series of randomly connected incidents than the books that precede or follow it. And the battle to defend Amber and the way Corwin takes the kingship from Eric are both oddly unsatisfying after all the buildup to them.
But the visual intensity of Zelazny’s writing still makes it worthwhile. In this book, also, we get to hear fun snippets of Corwin’s adventures on our own Earth, which is one of his particular favorites of the shadow worlds—one where he has befriended several Earthly celebrities and lived for hundreds of years (including a few years in a prosaic two-bedroom house with attached garage in upstate New York).
And Zelazny always keeps it funnier than the usual medieval romantic fantasy with Corwin’s wry breaks into modern thought. At one point, for example, Corwin is starting to feel like maybe neither he nor any of his siblings are really fit to take their father’s throne, and he thinks to himself, “I would have liked to blame Dad for this inadequacy, but unfortunately I had known Freud too long not to feel self-conscious about it.” When his brother Benedict is pursuing them across the plains on the way to Amber, driving his horse like crazy, Corwin describes him as “moving like something in the Kentucky Derby.” And when Corwin finally gets to Amber and sees his brothers defending their homeland from demonic creatures, he says, “The invaders were strong, numerous. I had no idea as to what Eric might have in reserve. At that moment, it was impossible for me to gauge whether war bonds for Amber would be a good investment.”
The book is also relatively short, and it certainly keeps you going enough to get through it to book three, The Sign of the Unicorn, where we hope to at last see Corwin take the throne of Amber. But, of course, for Corwin, nothing will be easy.
The Sign of the Unicorn is the third book in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series. It doesn’t actually further the plot of the Chronicles much, except (a) to reveal that there is definitely a conspiracy within the family to kill our hero Corwin, and (b) to give us a little more information about the maze-like Pattern which seems to be the source of power for the royal family of Amber.